Max Collins: Hard Cash

It had been a risk, her being there. She’d made sure no one had any chance of seeing her go in or out of the place, but it was still a risk. Though after seeing how George had handled it, she was goddamn glad she’d been there. Oh, he’d managed to do it, managed to shoot the bitch, all right, but he’d gotten flaky as hell afterwards. Off his fucking nut. Thank God she’d been there to soothe him, to get him on his feet for the rest of the ordeal.

She looked at her watch again: not long now. Ten minutes and they could be here.

She finished her drink, got up from the table, and went into the bedroom.

The shotgun lay on the bed.

Twin barrels. Twin triggers. Sleek, black gun with walnut stock.

She’d practiced with it, in the wooded area around the cottage. Nothing elaborate; aim at a tree and hit it, that’s all she needed to be able to do. It’d be close range. Just so she had the feel of the gun — was used to its kick. She’d have to fire twice, after all, and had to be ready to reload and shoot again, if something should go wrong.

In a few minutes, it would all be over — all but the final few grisly steps. She and George would transfer the bodies to the van; George would return to Port City to play bereaved widower; and she, after nightfall, would drive the van and its gory cargo and leave it along the side of a nearby (but not too nearby) back road. The shotgun would be thrown in the river. The authorities would be looking for the nonexistent third member of the robbery team, the man who had “held Cora Rigley hostage” while Nolan and Jon looted the bank, the man who killed Cora Rigley when she tried to take a gun from her jewelry drawer and defend herself, the man who then double-crossed and killed his two partners and disappeared with all that money.

It gave her a sense of satisfaction to have fooled a pro like Nolan. The crucial thing had been to make him accept the idea of Cora Rigley as hostage. George had insisted to Nolan it was necessary; he’d said that a bank president who is the victim of two bank robberies within so short a span of time is going to look somewhat silly and incompetent no matter what, but at least with his wife in jeopardy, some sympathy would be aroused. Besides, it would keep everyone at the bank from contacting the police right away. Nolan, of course, had balked at involving George’s wife, but George had explained she wouldn’t be involved at all — that Cora was a drunk who slept till noon; that he would cut their phone wires the morning of the robbery; that their second car was in the shop, leaving Cora stranded there at home.

“What about later,” Nolan had wanted to know, “when your wife is questioned about being a hostage and knows nothing about it?”

George had explained, “I’ll say you people grabbed me outside the house and that I never actually saw one of the thieves with my wife.”

And, finally, Nolan had agreed the wife-as-hostage angle was worth including.

And it certainly was.

She smiled, sat on the bed, and cradled the shotgun in her lap, thinking about what life would be like as a millionaire’s wife.

When she walked out with the shotgun into the other room, she was totally unprepared for the door to open and the two figures in hunting jackets to enter. It was too early. She hadn’t heard the van approach. They couldn’t be here yet.

But they were.

She fired the shotgun.

One barrel at a time.

And the two men in hunting jackets, the older man and the young one, too, caught the full blast and lifted off the floor and flopped bloodily back down again on the crinkly plastic shroud.

Jon was glad it was almost over. Flat, snow-covered farmland glided by as he drove the van along at a leisurely forty-five, the blacktop road not devoid of traffic, but damn near. Nolan sat next to Jon, looking almost bored; he hadn’t said a word since leaving Port City out this back door of a blacktop. Jon’s hands were sweaty on the wheel. The gun in his belt was a lump nudging his belly like something not fully digested. Like a reminder of what might have happened at the bank, had anything gone wrong. Of the ugly kind of things that can happen when a robbery goes haywire.

Like that time, a few months ago, at the Comfort farm. A simple job. Simple and potentially less dangerous than today’s. And yet it had turned into a nightmare of guns going off and people dying. People getting killed.

One of them by him.

He felt the gun in his belt under the jacket, pressing into his gut, and thought, Thank God I’m not going to have to use this fucking thing.

“No shooting,” Nolan had told him last night. “This job’s not worth the risk. We got money. We aren’t desperate. So if we get caught — well, okay, we make bail, get our asses out of the country. But if we start shooting, somebody might get killed, and they don’t offer bail when somebody’s killed.”

“No shooting,” Jon had nodded, relieved. “That means we’ll be getting rid of the guns right after the robbery, then, right? At the car wash, when we hose down the van and dump those Santa suits?”

“No.”

“No?”

“We’ll hang on to the guns a while after that.”

“I thought you said no shooting.”

“Unless somebody shoots at us first.”

“You don’t mean cops...?”

“Christ no! Don’t ever shoot at a cop. Jesus!”

“Then what the hell are you talking about, Nolan?”

“I’m not talking about cops, that’s for goddamn sure.”

“Well, who else is there...? Oh. I see what you mean. You... you really think that’s a possibility?”

“Rigley and his bitch crossing us? Yes. If it was just Rigley, I’d say no. But it isn’t just Rigley. So stay alert.”

Jon’s mental replay of the conversation of the night before ended as he pulled onto the blacktop off of which was Rigley’s cottage. When they passed the run-down shack-on-stilts that was Rigley’s closest neighbor, Nolan said to stop a moment: there was a car, a Buick Electra, parked next to the shack. Then he said go on. Jon did.

Jon was swinging the van down the tree-sheltered drive to the cottage when they heard the sound. “What the hell was that?”

“Gunfire,” Nolan said, getting the .38 out of his belt.

“Gunfire?”

“Shotgun.”

Jon brought the van to a halt alongside the yellow Mustang that belonged to the girl.

“Watch that fucker Rigley,” Nolan said. He hopped out of the van.

Jon did the same. He wiped the sweat off his hand, took the .38 from out of his belt and went around to the back of the van and let a white-faced Rigley out.

“What’s going on?” the banker said.

“You tell me,” Jon said, and motioned at him with the .38.

Nolan had already disappeared inside the cottage, and Jon’s teeth were clamped together in tense anticipation of further sounds from within the cottage.

He grabbed Rigley by the elbow and prodded him with the gun and pushed him forward, toward the cottage. The scary part was Rigley made no protest; a little indignation from the man would have gone a long way toward easing Jon’s fears.

The door was open, but Jon couldn’t see in. The cottage was set up too high for that; you’d have to climb the wooden steps to see what was going on in there.

He stood outside in the cold air for a few long moments, digging the gun barrel into Rigley’s back, wishing to hell something would happen and at the same time that it wouldn’t.

“Come on in, kid,” Nolan’s voice said from inside. “There’s an old friend of yours here.”

Jon shoved Rigley toward the door, up the steps. Inside.

And Jon couldn’t believe what he saw.

Nolan said, “Shut the door, kid. Rigley, sit down.”